Feb 12, 2009

Jaunty Kernel News

Pete Graner has tried to recap some of the more interesting things that have been going on with Ubuntu, specifically the kernel happenings in the Jaunty Jackalope release.

The Platform Team met in Berlin for the Jaunty Platform Sprint for the week of 2-6 Feb. This was an incredible event with the vast majority of the Canonical Engineering teams. Here is some of the roadmap items and the most interesting highlights...

Kernel Version:The Jaunty Kernel version will be 2.6.28. The 2.6.29 kernel was considered, but it was not selected however due to all of the major changes. The primary reasons were due to the large number new features that are scheduled to land in it. Regression of functionality is a large concern and there would be a good chance of that happening given when estimated date that Linus will declare it baked. Unfortunately it just doesn't line up with the Jaunty release cycle. On the bright side... for Jaunty+1 we will have time to shake out any issues and are looking towards 2.6.30 or .31

Suspend & Resume:Suspend & resume is one of the top priorities for this cycle. We ran a suspend and resume workshop with every notebook at the sprint.Surprisingly we had a small number of failures. Most of them were on resume with NVidia video. We did not test the priority divers only the free ones. Out of 65 machines tested (various models) there were 12 failures.

Other notable suspend and resume news for Jaunty: * There is a new testing script to test (and stress test) suspend resume. * Suspend/Resume script will also be integrated into checkbox (aka System->Administration->System Testing) for ease of testing. * If a suspend/resume cycle fails it is detected by apport and the user will have the option of filing a bug